Monthly Archives: November 2017

I create content for many customers and vendors including Microsoft. Often there is a discussion about the difference between a live webinar and an offline video. Here are the differences between the two. A live webinar is easier to deliver to a live audience. But creating an appealing and high-impact video is far more difficult!

Item

Webinar

Video content

Audience

Live audience connected remotely using Skype, etc..

No audience while creating the content

Impact

During the webinar delivery

Viewing after publishing

Script

High level topics with live demo. The content plan is written with live audience in mind.

Detailed script with every sentence and associated visuals pre-defined

Editing and Post-production

No editing. It is necessary to upload the actual content.

Editing and FX are used to increase the appeal, simplify delivery of knowledge and explain concepts / processes

Most people do not need to know the exact version (nor do they care). But in case you are troubleshooting a problem with Office, you will need to know the version.

Finding the exact version is a funny story. Why? Because the version is shown somewhere in some menu. Over time, that menu itself has been changed and moved around. Therefore, the answer to the question “Which version do I have?” is “You have to go to place x, depending upon the version you have”.

That does not make any sense. Therefore, it is a visual answer. You have to literally look at the way Office looks (Word, Excel , etc. ) and then figure out where the version is mentioned.

Microsoft has written a detailed article with screen shots to answer this question. Here is the link Which Office version do I have?. This shows various screen shots. You open a file in Word and compare the screenshots to find the version. Funny but true.

The commonest reason of slow PC / laptop is too many browser windows open – in too many browsers. It does not matter if it is IE, Edge, Firefox, Chrome or Safari… all of them are like an operating system! Just close them first. Find out the actual browser pages you want and re-open them. That’s it.

I have just the browsers open. No other apps. Each browser has just ONE site open. IE = CNN.com, EDGE = Amazon.in, CHROME = YouTube.com, Firefox = portal.office.com

We tend to forget how many sites we have opened in how many browsers! Be mindful of that and you are good to go.

If a cell has no data in it, the data from the cell on the left side spills over it. This can lead to confusion while reading and understanding the data. How to remove this cell spill-over? Very simple. Just three steps:

Select the data range.

Press Ctrl G or F5 to open the Go To dialog.

Click the Special button.

Choose the Blanks option.

Now, all the empty cells in the highlighted area will be selected.

Just type a spacebar. This will go automatically into the active cell.

We need complex presentations quite often, e.g. Periodic reviews, new projects, planning, and so on. Such complex presentations usually need inputs from multiple persons. Each one sends a small piece of presentation to some central coordinator – not just once, but repeatedly. The central person struggles with copy pasting stuff, fights with formatting and layout conflicts and has a miserable life in general!

The solution is simple. Store the base presentation on OneDrive, SharePoint or Teams. Share it with all the contributors and let them edit it. Try it out now!

Editing complex presentations together: Benefits

Multiple persons can work on the presentation simultaneously, without confusing each other.

Enormous time saving

There are no copies (CCs) to deal with. The presentation is always a single file.

Past versions are stored automatically so that you can refer to an earlier edit.

You can see if others are editing simultaneously. You can go and look at the slide they are working on.

If required, you can clarify doubts or suggest changes to each other using chat (Skype FB )

If there is a conflict, the owner can resolve it. Conflict occurs when two users change the same item in two different ways.

It is simple, useful and revolutionary. Practice this with your colleagues couple of times and then you will have the confidence and the motivation to use it in real life.

Here is a very useful collection. I am sure you have noticed the PowerPoint Icons – 450+ beautifully created SVG graphics. The problem is that you need to select and download icons on demand. Two problems. Firstly, it requires an internet connection and second problem is the need for inserting the same icon again and again.

I solved both problems by manually downloading each and every icon available today (7 Nov 2017). You can download this presentation (5 mb) and get offline access to all icons. Remember, SVG format allows these to be scaled without any loss of resolution. SVG support is available only with Office 2016 and upwards and of course Office Pro Plus.